The detective was sitting in his SUV on a July afternoon, watching 911 calls scroll across his laptop, when a yellow alert flashed.

Missing child. An 11-year-old boy had disappeared from a neighborhood on the southern edge of St. Petersburg.

Sounds like a case for … a drone.

“I’m mobile and will be there at that missing kid in a few minutes,” Detective Jimmy DeMaria called into his radio.

“It’d be great if he saw the drone and waved at us or something.”

DeMaria drove toward Lake Maggiore. Two patrol cars were outside the house where the boy had last been seen.

He’s wearing a striped polo shirt and khaki pants, the woman at the door told them, and he’s about 4-foot-10. He was mad because she had punished him by taking his phone and video games. He had been playing basketball in the backyard, but when she went inside to use the bathroom, he ran.

“We’ll fly around the area and see if we can find him,” DeMaria told the woman, who he learned was the boy’s foster mom. “I’ll keep the thermal camera on in case it picks up heat on something I miss.”

From his SUV, the detective pulled out a black box, the size of a carry-on suitcase. He set it on the ground and pulled out an Xbox controller. Then he carried a drone to the edge of the curb and unfurled its four spidery arms.

Seconds later, blue and red lights flashed from the blades as the drone whirred straight up, toward the sun.

‘It feels like cheating’

Law enforcement officers on both sides of Tampa Bay have been using drones since 2019.

But what started as “eye in the sky” support for large crowds and traffic control is quickly becoming an invaluable part of policing. Officers on the scene increasingly request virtual backup.

Drones are sent on search and rescues, crime scene investigations, into hostage situations. They can show officers whether a suspect has a gun, tail someone down a dark alley, track getaway cars.

“They’re little tanks with wings. And the cameras are great,” DeMaria said. “You can zoom in 126 times — and read a license plate from a mile away.”

Tampa officers fly six drones over the city.

St. Petersburg has 14 — and recently opened a Real Time Intelligence Center at its downtown station. Three “hives” sit on the roof, each constantly charging a drone. From a room next to the 911 call center, officers can launch them, dispatching drones up to three miles away.

“It’s way easier to send out a drone than a helicopter or a car,” DeMaria said. A drone can get somewhere close in two minutes.

“It feels like cheating,” said his supervisor, Sgt. Robert Long. “I love a good foot pursuit. But you’re not going to outrun a drone.”

So far, 60 St. Petersburg police officers have gotten certified to fly drones. Some carry them in their cars. Others check them out for specific cases. Through July 21 of this year, officers had flown 2,575 flights. That’s more than twice as many as last year. A couple have crashed, one hit a power line, another a tree.

A drone helped capture a man at the Pier who police said had punched a Jehovah’s Witness in the face. Another tracked someone suspected of pistol-whipping a gas station worker. One flying over the St. Anthony’s Triathlon spotted a swimmer clinging to a buoy, having a heart attack. Drones hovered over the Pride parade, No Kings protests, the Grand Prix. After the hurricanes in 2024, they showed police damaged areas that were difficult to reach.

Each drone is the size of a large pizza, weighs 5 pounds and can travel up to 45 mph. It has spotlights to illuminate dark places, parachutes in case of a crash, speakers so an officer can shout through it. Pilots have to steer clear of airports, military bases and power lines and fly the craft between 200 and 400 feet high. The drones can travel for a half hour before they need to be recharged.

A drone dispatched from downtown can reach as far south as the Skyway Bridge, west to 49th Street. Within two years, the department plans to add hives at five fire departments so drones can cover the whole city remotely.

Across the United States, at least 910 law enforcement agencies fly drones, according to the University of Florida’s Institute for County Government. In Florida, 14 police departments, 10 sheriff’s offices and 10 fire departments use drones.

While officers laud them for making policing safer and helping to catch criminals, drones raise privacy concerns. As Flock cameras and AI-powered surveillance spread, people are increasingly wary of these all-seeing eyes. Can police hover drones above your home, peer into your windows or yard?

Super Mario helped

The boy couldn’t have climbed that tall fence, DeMaria decided after flying the drone over the St. Pete backyard.

Twenty minutes after the child left home, the detective turned his drone around and started flying in a tight grid. Across the street, around the corner, back and forth above laurel oaks and palm trees, over sheds and swimming pools. The metallic whir sounded like a swarm of mosquitoes.

“He could be anywhere. Heading to a friend’s house, down by the water, in an alley,” DeMaria said. “Or he could have gone to the library or a store, somewhere inside where we can’t see him.”

The detective said he doesn’t get nervous. But he feels the weight of responsibility.

DeMaria, 33, started flying drones for the police department in October, after earning his pilot’s certification from the Federal Aviation Administration. He’s been training for this job, he said, since he was 6.

Playing Super Mario gave him command of the controller. Now, he’s more into Battlefield, Crusader Kings and Duck Hunt.

“There’s a certain type of nerd that’s attracted to this,” he said. Most of the police drone pilots are gamers. Many bought their own drones for off-duty flying. When DeMaria took a vacation in the Blue Ridge Mountains, he packed his personal drone. “The more you fly it,” he said, “the better you get.”

It took the detective about 10 minutes to map the missing boy’s neighborhood from the air. Then he guided the drone over the area again and kept stopping to zoom in. Over an empty house with a “For Sale” sign. Above a sprawling sycamore. Out to the lake, where he hovered over an alligator.

“I hope he didn’t go near there,” DeMaria said.

After a half hour, he flew the drone back, reached into his SUV and got another battery. Then he sent the craft back into the air.

Privacy vs. surveillance

Laws about drones have been evolving for the past decade but haven’t kept up with the technology, according to a University of South Florida professor.

In 2015, Florida passed the Freedom from Unwanted Surveillance Act, prohibiting flying drones over people’s homes, guaranteeing “a reasonable expectation of privacy.” The law makes exemptions for police work.

Legislators didn’t anticipate the advances AI would make.

“There are too many open questions still about privacy vs. surveillance,” said Kaushal Kafle, who teaches cybersecurity and artificial intelligence at USF. “In your backyard, you should have a reasonable expectation of privacy. But not if police say there might be a fugitive hiding there.”

To send a drone into someone’s yard, state law says officers have to get a search warrant, except during certain emergencies — basically, the same rules that apply to police searching your home.

“The law is flexible enough to allow officers to classify any situation as an imminent threat,” the professor said. “As long as there’s a crime they can point to later on, the lines of privacy blur very quickly.”

Tampa and St. Petersburg police have adopted their own drone policies. Officers won’t fly random patrols or run surveillance flights over residential areas. They are supposed to focus only on the incident at hand. After 30 days, they delete the video, unless it contains evidence.

“How do they ensure that they only capture the data they need?” asked the professor. If the drones are reading license plates from afar, are they also recording people’s faces in crowds?

St. Petersburg police said they aren’t using facial recognition with their drone footage. “But it’s kind of unchartered waters,” DeMaria said. “There’s not a lot of precedent to how these can be used.” The detective said he’s often talking to the state attorney’s office, trying to figure out what officers are allowed to do with drones.

Stetson law professor Paul Boudreaux, and a Pinellas County court clerk, both said they aren’t aware of local cases challenging the use of drones. The ACLU has sued law enforcement agencies in Maryland, Michigan and New York in recent years, arguing that their drone programs violate people’s privacy.

“The law may need to change as the world evolves and our expectations change,” Boudreaux said.

St. Petersburg police use Skydio X10 drones, which cost about $30,000, DeMaria said. Each docking station is $100,000. A police spokesperson said grants funded some of the equipment.

This fiscal year, St. Petersburg budgeted $3.3 million for Axon — the policing giant formerly known by the name of its signature product, Taser. Axon supplies drone equipment, body cameras and video systems to law enforcement nationwide.

“It’s important to understand where the police see this technology going forward,” said USF’s Kafle. “Do they want to weaponize it? Could drones shoot at suspects?

“And we’re just now starting to reckon with the AI side of all this.”

Bring him home

The detective’s drone soared over a playground, where all the swings were empty, past a picnic table where no one was sitting, through a vacant park.

His eyes darted from the sky to his controller, mapping the path.

Down the road. Up a sidewalk. Between houses. Behind garages.

“Is there somewhere you want the drone to check specifically?” DeMaria called to dispatch. “I’m not finding anything.”

Sweat soaked his shirt. He’d been standing in the summer sun for almost an hour. The drone was about to die. He was getting ready to land it and replace the battery again when his radio crackled.

The clerk at a nearby Marathon gas station had called police. A boy had walked in alone, trying to buy a drink. An officer was on his way to bring him back to his guardian.

DeMaria was relieved. He packed his drone, set its battery in the charger and climbed back into his SUV. Before cranking the A/C, he checked his computer screen, searching for the next call that might need a drone.

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